Bike news from BikePortland

BikePortland writes the Monday Roundup, a summary of bike news from around the world that caught our eyes this week." This Monday's Roundup contains lots of interesting tidbits. We've taken the liberty of extracting a few of the best:

Bike share placemaking: In NYC, Citi Bike stations are providing more than just transportation. People are using them for on-street public seating, rendezvous points and interaction hubs, all from "the space that would have otherwise been used to store a couple of empty cars."

Total safety: The almost daily drumbeat of road deaths has convinced a TV anchor in New York City that Vision Zero, a policy that to use road design to eliminate them, is "a fight worth having."

Suburban calm: The "safest suburb in the world" got that way by building "two separate transportation networks." The city of 44,000 suffered exactly one traffic fatality between 2001 and 2005.

Gas tax hike: U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Portland) wants to add 15 cents per gallon to repair roads and build new infrastructure. It'd be the first such increase in 20 years, during which time the market price of a gallon has risen $2.20.

License requirements: A British driver's license is "basically a Ph.D. in driving," while American driving tests are "a joke," writes an American in England.

Safety gap: People on bikes and foot account for 15% of annual average U.S. traffic deaths, a recent study found. In car-bike collisions, people were using bikes legally 89% of the time and people in cars are at fault 87% of the time.

Pro-bike smackdown: "Just as it would be inefficient to force travelers to walk or bike for trips most efficiently made by motorized modes, it is inefficient and unfair to force travelers to drive for trips most efficiently made by active modes," writes Todd Litman in a total demolition of most arguments in favor of car-dependent cities. I especially like his calculation that building Portland's 2030 bike plan would cost "$6 to $25 annually per capita, a small fraction of the approximately $665 per capita spent annually on roadways."

Biking gadgets: Laser-projected bike lights, snap-on electric assists, airbag-style helmets: all part of a boom in cool bike gadgets, but maybe a "distraction" from the supposed need for "hard segregation" to improve safety.

Easy e-bike: The 12-pound, $700 Copenhagen Wheel, which snaps into your rear dropout and gives your bike a smartphone-connected electric assist, is now on sale, and it's worth a couple minutes as your video of the week: